“Prioritization of Resilience Initiatives for Climate-Related Disasters in the Metropolitan City of Venice” is a multidisciplinary research project, pushing the frontiers of environmental and climate science and engineering. It has won the tenth annual Aspen Institute Italia Award for scientific research and collaboration between Italy and the United States.
The research has been carried out within the BRIDGE project, “Building resilience of society to natural disasters: improved methodologies and solutions for Italy and US”. The BRIDGE project – a “Progetto di Grande Rilevanza” for cooperation between Italy and the US, funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – ran from 2019 to 2022. It relied on a multidisciplinary research team composed of Italian (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change) and American (University of Virginia, Carnegie Mellon University and the US Army Corps of Engineers) experts on risk and resilience for natural disasters.
The main aim of BRIDGE was to provide tools to assess the resilience of coastal communities to natural disasters. A US-Italy community of resilience practitioners and educators was created, to sustain cross-disciplinary efforts in assessing and managing extreme events. Specific objectives of the project were:
▪ Select and apply advanced methods and tools to evaluate the resilience of coastal communities to natural disaster, and to identify and rank resilience-enhancing initiatives;
▪ Support decision-makers (regional and local administrations) and civil protection agencies in enhancing community preparedness; improve the capacity to cope with disaster through targeted communication and dissemination activities in Italy and the United States;
▪ Strengthed US-Italy bilateral scientific relationships by sustaining cross-disciplinary efforts in assessing and managing natural disasters in both countries.
In the context of climate-related disasters – characterized by low probability, high consequence risks, and uncertainty – the concept of resilience can be particularly useful. It can identify critical system functionalities relevant for stakeholders and focus attention on longer-term horizons in processes of risk reduction and adaptation. In other words, resilience offers the opportunity to bring a different perspective – one that might otherwise be missed by traditional risk analysis approaches. The goal is to improve the ability to understand the capacity of a system to recover from a massive external shock. The methodology was tested in the Metropolitan City of Venice and its Lagoon: the intent was to prioritize a list of management measures to increase the ability of coastal systems and communities to resist the impacts of climate change (i.e. rising sea levels, floods, heat waves, droughts).
Following the publication of the study in 2022, a new collaboration between researchers was launched. This stage was developed within the framework of the Horizon Europe program, funded by the European Commission. The project, titled AGnostic risk management for high Impact Low probability Events (AGILE), enhances the methodologies developed in the BRIDGE project and will help extend them to other international case studies in Europe (including Venice), the United States and Japan.
The study was a collaboration among eight scientists:
- Marta Bonato
Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC Foundation), Lecce, Italy
Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy
Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany
- Andrea Critto
Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC Foundation), Lecce, Italy
Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy
- James H. Lambert
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
- Igor Linkov
Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers, Concord, MA, USA
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
- Antonio Marcomini
Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC Foundation), Lecce, Italy
Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy
- Beatrice Sambo
Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC Foundation), Lecce, Italy
Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy
- Anna Sperotto
Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC Foundation), Lecce, Italy
Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy
Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Scientific Campus of the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Bizkaia, Spain
- Silvia Torresan
Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC Foundation), Lecce, Italy